April 21, 2010

Mark Twain the geologist

Mark Twain died one hundred years ago today

“The Old Oolitic Silurian” – my father used to periodically quote
this to me to illustrate his familiarity with geological terminology and to
remind me of the connections between his own field, American Literature, and my
own. Twain was one of my Dad’s favourite writers, and he worked extensively on
Twain’s reception in Europe (enthusiastic – Charles Darwin, for example, was a
great fan), and his relationships with his English publishers. This led me to
appreciate how often, amongst his prolific and highly entertaining observations,
Twain wrote about geology – and yes, sand. My Dad’s quotation comes from
Life on the Mississippi and ends with one his classic comments:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower
Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an
average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm
person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian
Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was
upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the
Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that
seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a
mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their
streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a
mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets
such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact.

Twain seemed to have a particular fondness for the Old Red
Sandstone, the gigantic piles of sand and other sediments that poured off the
growing mountain chains of Europe and North America 400 million years ago. These
are the rocks that contain the testaments to the remarkable evolution of fishes
and the first footprints of life on the land. Twain wrote the following, in his
1903 essay “Was the World Made for Man?”:

So the Old Silurian seas were opened up to breed the fish in, and at the same
time the great work of building Old Red Sandstone mountains eighty thousand feet
high to cold-storage their fossils in was begun. This latter was quite
indispensable, for there would be no end of failures again, no end of
extinctions—millions of them—and it would be cheaper and less trouble to can
them in the rocks than to keep tally of them in a book.

Elsewhere, he wrote of “that poor, decrepit, bald-headed, played-out,
antediluvian Old Red Sandstone formation which they call the Smithsonian
Institute.”

Unfortunately, here Twain got his geology wrong – the original Smithsonian
building was constructed from the New Red Sandstone, the sediments that
filled the rift valleys as Europe and North America began drifting apart 200
million years ago.

Twain also wrote of desert sandstorms and the commercial possibilities of
sand. In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom, Huck Finn, and Jim take off on a Jules
Verne–like voyage in “the boat,” a science-fiction hot air balloon. Sailing over
the Sahara, they watch a camel caravan plodding over the dunes below them:

Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide wall,
and reached from the Desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and it was coming
like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck us, and then it come
harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against our faces and sting like fire,
and Tom sung out:

“It’s a sand-storm—turn your backs to it!”

We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a gale, and the sand beat
against us by the shovelful, and the air was so thick with it we couldn’t see a
thing. In five minutes the boat was level full, and we was setting on the
lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads out and could hardly
breathe.

Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off
across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out and looked
down, and where the caravan was before there wasn’t anything but just the sand
ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people and camels was smothered and
dead and buried—buried under ten foot of sand, we reckoned, and Tom allowed it
might be years before the wind uncovered them, and all that time their friends
wouldn’t ever know what become of that caravan.

Realizing that “the boat” (apparently defying the laws of physics) contains
several tons of “genuwyne sand from the genuwyne desert of the Sahara,” they
consider the commercial potential of putting it into vials and selling it back
home (presumably to early arenophiles), “because it’s over four million square
miles of sand at ten cents a vial.” But the scale of the operation—and that of
the duties they would have to pay—leads them to abandon the idea.

When Twain was 17 or 18 years old, he worked as a part-time
typesetter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, still the city’s primary
newspaper. Still being marooned in Philadelphia, the Inquirer is my
daily paper, and it was their article that drew my attention to the centenary of
Twain’s death. He wrote to his brother that “Unlike New York, I like this
Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it.” On the whole, I agree with him –
but I do love New York. Reading the newspaper article, I came across a comment
that leads to me concluding this with a political viewpoint (something that I
generally try to avoid on this blog). The article included the following
comment:

Twain is a strange figure to hold up as a national hero. No writer
ever sang this country so well – but none ever lanced the boils of its hypocrisy
with such needlepoint precision, either.

Isn’t that exactly the kind of national hero every
country needs, someone who is equally skilled and perceptive at singing its
praises and lancing its boils?

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Twain is one of my favourite writers, too. His books and short stories are full of geological references; my favourite is his description (in "The Innocents Abroad") of a fossil oyster bed he found near the top of a mountain in the Middle East. After considering several hypotheses on its origin, he concludes that the only reasonable explanation is that the oysters climbed up there to enjoy the view!

In one of his short stories, "Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls" (1875), a team of scientists (bugs, frogs, spiders, etc.) strike out on an exploratory expedition and make all sorts of questionable interpretations based on the "fossils" they come across--including a telegraph pole insulator, which the team's naturalist interprets to be remains of a gigantic spider: "And that evening the naturalist of the expedition built a beautiful model of the colossal spider, having no need to see it in order to do this, because he had picked up a fragment of its vertebrae by the tree, and so knew exactly what the creature looked like and what its habits and its preferences were by this simple evidence alone." There are also references to the Old Red Sandstone, "vertical strata of limestone", and "up-shootings of igneous rock", among others.

There are geological references in his book "Roughing It", in which he describes his failed attempts at gold mining in the southwestern US, and other adventures.

A belated thanks for these further gems, Howard! The spider story reminds me of "The blind men and the elephant," a tale whose accurate reflection on human nature results in its showing up in so many different cultures and contexts.